Head of Bio AI - Radial
About Astera
Astera is a private foundation dedicated to advancing science and technology towards an abundant future. We aim to harness the convergence of AI with other fields to accelerate innovation and rethink the institutions driving scientific progress.
About Radial
Radial is a research organization within Astera focused on reimagining life science research at a systems level. We design, fund, and operate programs that address foundational scientific challenges while also innovating new methods of scientific inquiry.
Position Summary
Mission: Hire a founding technical leader to serve as the CEO’s technical co-pilot. This individual will co-architect Radial’s scientific and technical direction, build the AI and computational infrastructure across programs, and set the technical bar through their own hands-on work.
Key Outcomes (12–24 Months)
Technical Architecture & Program Leadership: Establish AI and computational architecture across current and future programs, beginning with DiffUSE and its expansion across multiple structural biology data modalities. Shape foundational bottlenecks addressed and how they become durable technical systems. Make build-vs-fund-vs-partner decisions across Radial’s program portfolio.
Hands-On Building: Conceive, architect, and directly prototype early modeling systems and core infrastructure. Design scalable training workflows, data pipelines, validation frameworks, and evaluation benchmarks. Evolve capabilities from early prototyping to production-grade, open platforms the scientific community can build on.
Team & Culture: Build a high-caliber AI and engineering team, starting small and scaling deliberately. Set the technical bar through hands-on contribution and architectural authorship. Establish a culture of technical rigor, intellectual honesty, and disciplined experimentation.
Ecosystem & Impact: Engage leading scientific collaborators and build technically rigorous partnerships. Represent Radial’s technical vision within the AI and life sciences communities. Ensure outputs are structured and shared as durable public goods.
Competencies
Functional Expertise: Deep expertise in modern ML: large-scale training, representation learning, generative modeling (diffusion, transformers, foundation models). Track record of translating ideas into working, scalable systems. Understanding of the interplay between machine learning and physics-based modeling. Direct experience formulating and solving inverse problems, including familiarity with ill-posedness, regularization strategies, and the trade-offs between learned and model-based reconstruction approaches. Experience building and iterating on ML pipelines for large-scale, data-intensive problems, including efficient data ingestion, preprocessing of high-dimensional inputs, and training workflows that scale across distributed compute resources. Systems-level thinking across data generation, modeling, infrastructure, and experimentation. Experience designing technical platforms intended to endure and compound over time. Scientific range beyond a single modality can engage across problem domains.
Leadership Attributes: Has managed small technical teams; knows how to attract and retain exceptional talent. Hands-on builder who sets the standard through their own work. Deep familiarity with the frontier AI x Bio landscape. Operates effectively in ambiguity; creates clarity through disciplined technical judgment.
Cultural Alignment: Motivated by the chance to build something that doesn’t exist yet. Committed to open science and durable public infrastructure. Thrives in early-stage, open-ended environments blending AI and biology.
Location
This role is hybrid, based in Emeryville, CA. The CEO and most of the team are on-site at least 3 days per week.
Compensation
The successful candidate will receive a competitive compensation package commensurate with their experience. As a nonprofit organization, Astera is exempt from the H-1B cap; visa sponsorship may be available for qualified candidates.
Benefits Summary
Additional Information
Astera Institute Mission & Vision
Astera Institute Overview
Astera Institute Team
Sharpening Astera’s Focus
Dileep’s Blog: From Systems Operators to Systems Architects
DiffUSE Project
Seemay’s Blog: From Systems Operators to Systems Architects
DiffUSE January 2026 Retreat
DiffUSE Project LinkedIn
Compensation Range
$400K - $600K